The Mark of Cain

Somewhere, and it's not in this new Everyman's Library edition, James M. Cain betrayed a state secret when he said that "a writer can only write two hours a day." The truth in this observation more than makes up for a small perjury in his introduction to his novel The Butterfly: "Except personally, with many engaged in it, I am not particularly close to the picture business, and have not been particularly successful in it. True, several of my stories have made legendary successes when adapted for films.... I have learned a great deal from pictures, mainly technical things. Yet in the four years or more that I have actually spent on picture lots, I have accumulated but three fractional credits." With his little shrug of "or more," as though it might be five, five and a half years, Cain hides, I think from himself, the fifteen years since leaving The New Yorker as managing editor and moving to Los Angeles under contract with Paramount. By the time he left Hollywood in 1947, those three fractional credits were Algiers, Stand Up and Fight and Gypsy Wildcat. But Hollywood was his day job, and in the same time he wrote his greatest books, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce, all in this collection, along with five stories exhumed from dead magazines. It took Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder to adapt Double Indemnity, almost as faithful a job of typing as John Huston's script for The Maltese Falcon. It took Faulkner to adapt Chandler's The Big Sleep, and the only writer who should or could have adapted the Faulkner best suited for film, The Wild Palms, was Cain.

It's a shame that this really wonderful introduction isn't included in this collection, because Cain knew how good he was, and says so:

I belong to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise, and I believe these so-called schools exist mainly in the imagination of critics.... Schools don't help the novelist but they do the critic; using as mucilage the simplifications that the school hypothesis affords him, he can paste labels wherever convenience is served by pasting labels, and although I have read less than twenty pages of Mr. Dashiell Hammet in my whole life, Mr. Clifton Fadiman can refer to my hammet-and-tongs style and make things easy for himself.

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